‘You can die for an idea, but never kill’: Madrid City Council has approved the naming of a street after Melchor RodriguezGarcía (1893, —February 14, 1972) anarchist militant, former bullfighter, Director-General of Prisons in Madrid during the early part of the Spanish Civil War, and the last Republican Mayor of Madrid. Also known as El Ángel Rojo (‘The Red Angel’) he was responsible not only for the prisoners’ security and prevention of escapes, but – more importantly – for preventing their extra-judicial murder by political opponents and vigilante lynch mobs. The most notable of such incidents occurred following an air raid on Alcalá de Henares air base when a group of protesters, some them armed, arrived at the prison, stormed the gates demanding that the cells be opened and the nationalist (fascist) prisoners be handed to the crowd. Melchor Rodríguez rushed from Madrid to the prison and confronted the crowd, ordering them to disperse, telling them he would rather arm the prisoners than hand them over to the mob. Among the saved prisoners were rightist General Valentín Gallarza, notable football player Ricardo Zamora, politician Ramón Serrano Súñer, Rafael Sánchez Mazas and Raimundo Fernández-Cuesta. During his term as DG of Prisons, Melchor Rodríguez García also revealed that José Cazorla Maure, a counsellor of state security of the Council of Defence of Madrid was running a network of private, illegal prisons (chekas) under the control of the Communist Party of Spain. Later in the war he became one of Madrid’s counsellors, on behalf of the Iberian Anarchist Federation. After the fall of Madrid in 1939 it fell to him, as Mayor, to officially pass the city administration over to the Francoist victors.

What has happened to editorial judgement at the TLS? What on earth led the editor to commission the patronisingly offensive twaddle from such a pro-Francoist apologist as Michael Seidman in his review of Paul Preston’s “The Spanish Holocaust”?

Apart from complaining about Preston’s ‘discrediting the moral capital of the Nationalists’, Seidman’s principal objection appears to be the use of the term “Holocaust” to describe the carnage triggered by the “rebellious officers, whom Hitler and Mussolini quickly aided” (the implication being that neither regime had been complicit in the plans to topple the Republic). This objection to the word Holocaust is either academic pedantry or a zealous political attempt by Seidman to ‘own’ the term on behalf, exclusively and of course unbidden, of the Jewish victims of Nazi anti-semitism at the expense of the other 5, 6 or 7 million victims of the Nazi killing machine — anti-Nazis (Jewish and non-Jewish), intellectuals, socialists, anarchists, communists, liberals, Jehovah’s Witnesses, gypsies, the mentally ill, the disabled, etc., etc. — between January 1933 and May 1945.

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Anarchism

Anarchism swept us away completely, because it demanded everything of us and promised everything to us. There was no remote corner of life that it did not illumine ... or so it seemed to us ... shot though with contradictions, fragmented into varieties and sub-varieties, anarchism demanded, before anything else, harmony between deeds and words
- Victor Serge, Memoirs of a Revolutionary